His father was a partner in a top Seattle law firm and his mother is a regent of the University of Washington and a director of Pacific Northwest Bell. You think that didn't give him any business advantages other talented programmers didn't have?

His mother is credited in her obituary with pulling strings to get him the IBM contract: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...

"Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John R. Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, the business that I.B.M. was doing with Microsoft.

Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."

Sure, Microsoft was on a nice trajectory, and there is no doubt that Bill Gates is smart.

However, that $25K check is the difference between Microsoft being a solidly growing company up against someone else that IBM anointed vs Microsoft is the anointed one.

$25K was about 5x the price of a car at the time. That makes it about $150K in modern dollars.

How many people can cut a $150K cash check because their kid says it's a good idea? Even most "millionaires" can't cut a check for cash at that level.

Starting a restaurant easily can cost $25K in those days. Yet people did it all the time.

Don't overlook that Microsoft was IBM's second choice. Their first was Digital Research.

And lastly, I haven't been able to find any evidence that Gates Sr. funded Microsoft with at $25,000 check. Citation needed! Certainly there's no mention in the book "Hard Drive", and my recollection is that he started MS with $5,000.

There's nothing Bill Gates did at the time that a very, very large number of people could have done, if they'd only thought of it and had been willing to risk it. I knew many computer people at the time, and they dismissed PCs as toys and saw no future in them. Including many who had money to invest in such a startup.

That amount of cash is not trivial for the vast majority of Americans.

Millions can do it, rendering the notion that that was what enabled Bill Gates to be a zillionaire absurd.

And then there are all those millions buying houses for over $500,000, and $30,000+ cars, who could invest $25,000 in a business instead. But that's why they aren't Bill Gates - they made different choices.

There are vastly more people with access to $25k in cash than there are people who end up making an impact as large as Gates had. It still takes an enormous amount of work and savvy to pull off what he did.

Gates seemed to be the only one who understood the value of DOS initially. Not you, not I, not Gary Kildall, not IBM, not Tim Paterson.

There were thousands of other people involved in the industry at the time. Many of them understood the future value of personal computer operating systems.

Any idea how he got to that unique understanding? Is that something we can learn from?

If you read http://gunkies.org/wiki/Gordon_Letwin_OS/2_usenet_post closely you'll understand the key business insight about the value of platforms that underlay a lot of Microsoft's success. And further see how Microsoft's continued success required a series of good decisions that capitalized on the famous lucky break.

If I knew how, I'd be a billionaire myself :-)

Sure. But if he didn't have access to that money, would he still have been able to do that?

Yes. An aggressive entrepreneur like Gates would be able to rustle up a few paltry thousand in investment capital. People do it all the time.

That is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.

His personal connections and family wealth were a lot more significant than one loan.